When I finished writing about the Zeno wagering game recently, I had some trees left over, so I thought I would try planting them here.
In the Zeno article I was trying to understand and explain the structure of this peculiar-looking tree, which I’ll call the tangled tree:
As a warmup exercise, I started out with […]
The latest issue of American Scientist is just out, both on the newsstand and on the web. My “Computing Science” column is titled “Wagering with Zeno”; it returns to a subject mentioned briefly in an earlier column, “Follow the Money.”
Consider a random walk on the interval (0,1), where the walker moves according to these […]
Leslie G. Valiant, whose work on holographic algorithms was the subject of a recent column in American Scientist and a brief note here on bit-player, has won the 2008 EATCS Award of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science. In addition to the work on holographic algorithms, the EATCS cites Valiant’s contributions of computational learning […]
Ages ago (in blog years) I mentioned some algorithmic ideas for getting passengers aboard airplanes faster, based on a 2005 paper by Steven Skiena and others. Since then, the queue at the departure gate has only gotten longer. Now another preprint on the same theme has landed in the arXiv. This one is by Jason […]
Very likely you already know how to count, but let’s review anyway. The usual counting sequence for the natural numbers starts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, … and goes on for quite some time. Some people prefer to start 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, …, but they wind up in the same place […]
I often use a computer to create graphics, but there was a time when I used graphics to compute. That era came back to me the other day in the library. I was browsing among dusty volumes in the folio section when I came upon this:
The Design of Diagrams
for Engineering Formulas
and
The Theory of Nomography
by
Laurence […]
In this season of giving and getting, you’ve got to admire the marketing savvy of the One Laptop Per Child project. They named their introductory sales campaign “Give One, Get One.” The computers cost $200 apiece. For a donation of $400, you send one machine to a child somewhere far away (Afghanistan, Cambodia, Haiti, Mongolia […]
The latest cute trick from Google is a service for producing quantitative graphics on demand. For example, here’s a bar chart of the traffic to this web site over the past year:
The cute part is how you get Google to produce the graphic. The whole specification—including data, scales, labels and stylistic preferences—gets packed into a […]
It’s time for my bimonthly self-promotional horn toot. The new issue of American Scientist is now available online, and paper copies should soon be stuffing mailboxes everywhere. My “Computing Science” column is on a new class of “holographic” algorithms invented a few years ago by Leslie G. Valiant of Harvard. The ideas have been further […]
Don Elgee, a retired teacher of mathematics and computer science from Ottawa, sends the following inquiry:
In hockey, when a team is down by a goal with about one minute to go, the goalie is pulled in favor of another offensive player. This illustrates a key point in the strategy of most games.
The object is not […]